


When My Brother Calls Me

by SylvanWitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, M/M, abusive!John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:48:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Pa was always a preacher.  I got a few things to say to God on the subject of devils who quote scripture. </i>  Dark, twisted little reimagining of the story we all know, inspired by Munly and the Lee Lewis Harlots' <i>Big Black Bull Comes Like a Caesar</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When My Brother Calls Me

Pa was always a preacher.

 

Our house set up on a little rise, prairie winds whipping night and day, moaning in the eaves.  When I was little, it made me cry, and Pa would come into my dark, cold room, kneel down by my bed and cuff my neck in his big hand, squeezing as he whispered harsh words over me, Revelation or sometimes Jeremiah.  Ezekiel.  Kings I and II.

 

“Do you not fear Me?’ says the Lord.‘Will you not tremble at My presence, who have placed the sand as the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass beyond it? And though its waves toss to and fro, yet they cannot prevail; though they roar, yet they cannot pass over it.’  Will you fear the Lord, boy?  Will you fear the Lord and your father his servant?”

 

Words on a river of whiskey breath and beratement drowning out the wind until I wished it would come back, anything but that voice and the awful words. 

 

Our house was always full of words.

 

It was better when Ma was still with us.  She could light up the kitchen with her smile even when the sky out the wavy glass window was tornado green, and somehow his words never meant as much when she was smiling at me.  That smile-light dimmed down or died out altogether when Pa was around, but he wasn’t often, not back then.  Too much call for a preacher in those settling days when he was all folks had to marry or bury them.

 

Ma died, though, on a screaming night in the fall of Samuel’s first year.  Took ill from something—I never knew what—and started moaning louder than the wind.  The night it got bad, Pa sent me out to the barn, and I was glad to go.  Anything to get away from the noises Ma made.  I waded through the wind, pants legs stuck to my legs, having to push so hard to get ahead, pull so hard to prop the barn door open enough just to slip inside.

 

It was dark, no lantern, but Jemmie lowed deep down in her throat, and from a long way off down the length of the barn, the high bleat of her calf came back, Caesar complaining of his treatment.  We’d just weaned him from her tit, and she wasn’t yet ready to let her little one go.

 

“Hush now,” I whispered just to see if I could hear myself, glad when I could.  Outside the wind howled, and overhead, a loose board in the loft slapped flat and loud.  I couldn’t hear Ma no more and that was fine.  

 

The smell of cow washed over me, grass-sweet, and I climbed the door into Jemmie’s stall and sat beside her, happy to be warm in the shifting dark, away from the sounds Ma made, worse than Jemmie when Caesar came breach back in the spring and we almost lost her.

 

“Like your brother,” Pa had said then, Samuel only three days old, Ma pale and sick-looking in the big bed upstairs.  There was blame in his voice even then, though I was too little to see it.  I recall it now, though, clear enough.

 

It was darker than the devil’s mouth, as Pa would say, when he threw open the barn door.  I couldn’t see him, but I could hear his heavy boots, his hard breathing, and something else, some soft sound out of place in the hard, cold dark.

 

I stood up, eyes straining to see him, but I was little and the stall door blocked my view of the barn aisle, and besides, there wasn’t any moonlight.

 

“Take ‘em,” Pa said, thrusting a pale blur at me over Jemmie’s stall door.  I couldn’t see Pa’s face, just the bundle that squirmed and cooed, which was when I knew it was Samuel.  “If he eats, fine.  If he don’t, no matter.”

 

I wanted to ask what he meant, but I couldn’t, scared he’d hit me like he often did or worse…things I won’t talk about.  Things that don’t mean a lick now, anyway.

 

“Ma?”

 

“She’s gone.  Take ‘em,” he said again, loosening his hold on my little brother.

 

I took Samuel, and after Pa clumped away and the barn door shut like judgment behind him, I knelt in the hay beside Jemmie and stroked her side, settling Samuel near her, feeling for her bag, for the swollen, silky teet, squeezing until I felt the milk come.

 

By touch I found Samuel’s mouth, yawning wide as he giggled, and aimed the warm stream at him until I felt it on my fingers and his tongue.  He’d be a mess in the morning, I thought, but at least he wouldn’t go hungry.

 

He woke me with a wail at the first grey light of dawn, Jemmie on her feet nosing us, Caesar down the way bleating and bleating.  Samuel smelt of sour milk and cow breath, but he squirmed whole and live in my arms, and I felt my heart swell at it.

 

“Hush now,” I said, to Samuel or Jemmie or her calf, I can’t say.  Maybe all three.  Maybe my own heart, rapping hard against my ribs.

 

After that, he was mine to keep alive.  I was four years old, and my brother was mine.

 

*****

 

Caesar grew into a big black bull, broad in the chest, higher than me by twice again.  Samuel loved him, smile breaking out across his face whenever he saw Caesar out to pasture.

  
Samuel’s first word was “bull.”

 

His second was my name.

 

“Pa” was some ways down the line, after all the names of the barn cats; our old rooster, Rut; and words for things he wanted, like apple and up.

 

Didn’t matter to Pa any, since he wasn’t around.  He’d taken to a circuit, wanted in all the places people had evil, for he’d gotten a reputation for the casting out of demons, and he was much in demand at that time.

 

I was seven when he left the first time for longer than a day or two.

 

“Mrs. Wilson’ll be by to check on you.  Keep out of trouble and don’t burn the place down,” he’d said, resting his hand on my head until I shuddered out from under it.  To Samuel, he said nothing.

 

“Mind me, boy.  You give me reason to think you’ve failed me, it’ll be a week of penance for you.”

 

Penance wasn’t something I could abide, though I spent enough time kneeling bare-legged in salt or standing naked under the pump in the cold or peeling hot wax from the skin of my wrists and the bend of my elbows.

 

“Yessir,” I said, not looking up.  It didn’t do to look at Pa those days. Something dark in his eyes made me cold in my belly, made me run for the outhouse with things all loose and cold inside.

 

Samuel came on chores with me, pen to pen, trough to trough, toddling over the rough ground, squealing and talking.  He always could talk, whole sentences even when he was only little, a lot of them from the bible Pa was always quoting at us.

 

Whenever Samuel got to copying Revelation, though, Pa would growl and glower, so I took to hushing my brother.  Samuel never seemed to notice Pa’s disturbance.  His eyes were always on me.

 

That time, he didn’t listen to me, though.

 

“C’mon away from there,” I said to Samuel, who’d strayed too close to Caesar’s horns, longer than my arms and bigger around than my legs.  “Come away.”

 

Samuel only fixed his eyes on me for a minute and smiled, and I knew before he moved that I wouldn’t be fast enough.

 

Caesar wasn’t a bad bull, wasn’t mean-spirited most of the time, but he was a ton of beef on the hoof and ready for breeding, besides, and Jemmie was out to the far pasture lowing and lowing, something mournful lonely in her call.

 

Samuel was just between them is all.

 

By the time I got to him, he was still, unbreathing, eyes closed, cheeks sucked in like he’d swallowed his tongue.

 

“Samuel!”  I shook him.  “Samuel!”  Prayers came out of me, but they were all wrong, about smiting the enemy and saving lost souls, nothing of comfort, no words of life for my brother.

 

He came up in my arms with a gasp, struck my chin with his head hard enough that my teeth clacked together around the tip of my tongue, bringing metal and fire to my mouth.

 

I didn’t care.  He was alive and warm in my arms, no stove ribs or broken limbs, just a throaty cry.

 

I bowed my head over his, smelled his sweat and sweetness, and clung until the thunder of hooves brought my head up to see Caesar back where he’d started, fence having thwarted his aim, staring at us like he hadn’t noticed us before now.

 

Something in me shifted as Samuel squirmed in my arms and tried to rise, saying “Caesar” and letting go a raspy laugh. 

“You’re mine,” I said, shaking him.  “Mine.”  I wasn’t gentle in the shaking, and my brother looked at me, shock in his little face.  The light left his eyes and he started to wiggle hard, eyes squinching up, lips and chin trembling.  I only tightened my hands on his arms.

  
“Mine, Samuel.  Don’t you leave me.”

 

A tear tracked its way down his cheek, and then he bit his lower lip, something stubborn setting his features, and he stopped crying, stopped trying to wriggle free, and just waited.

 

I let him go, but he didn’t go far.

 

*****

 

We branded Caesar in my tenth spring, when a big outfit fenced in the prairie to the north and Pa, always paranoid of strangers, said we had to mark what was ours.

 

Maybe that’s what got it into his head to mark me, too.  I don’t know.  I just know that he came back from a circuit with dark circles under his eyes, three days’ stubble on his cheeks, and a twisted mouth, whiskey-sour.

 

“On your knees, boy,” he said, which I’d heard enough.  Sometimes it was only praying.  Sometimes it’s what he called “atonement.”  Whatever, I didn’t want to go, not this time.  I was tall for ten, strong, too, running the farm and my brother both, keeping us alive while Pa preached about evil and cast out demons across the flatlands.

 

I didn’t drop the way he was used to, and he must’ve seen in my eyes that I wasn’t going willingly, that I was finished with whatever he wanted to put in my mouth, words or whatnot, it makes no never mind now.

 

That big hand caught me fast across the face, and I staggered but didn’t fall.  A noise drew my eyes to Samuel, standing on the bottom step in the next room, face afraid for me, lips already trembling.  I shook my head a little, shooed him away with a signal only he and I knew.

 

Pa hit me again and again, stripped his belt out of its loops and batted me around the room with it until I tripped over the edge of the hearthstone and fell flat on my belly on the worn boards near the slate apron.

 

His foot on my back held me down, and I heard him fumble with something, strained my head around to see him burying the poker’s wicked tip in the hot coals under the pothook.

 

I shoved and heaved but couldn’t get any purchase, and he crushed me down until I thought he’d break my ribs, all the while intoning snatches of scripture, muttering, “The eye that mocks a father, that scorns obedience to a mother, will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley, will be eaten by the vultures.  Will you shame your mother, boy?  Will you disobey your father, who the Lord has named your master?”

 

Breathless with fear, I didn’t move at first when his foot let up, but when his hands wrapped around my waist and hauled my ass into the air, I started fighting him.  Rough fingers ripped at my fly, buttons giving, as he tore my pants down around my knees and pushed me hard against the floor again.

 

Splinters drove into my softer parts, and every time I squirmed, trying to get away, I felt them slide in further. 

The heat of the poker told me what was coming next, and I took in a sobbing breath and promised myself I wouldn’t beg.  Twice my father set me on fire, searing my skin with the poker until I screamed, wordless in my rage, helpless under his heavy hand and his constant torrent of words.

 

“There, now you’re the Lord’s right and proper,” Pa said, using the poker to lever himself up off of one knee, dropping it with a clang beside the sooty shovel in the holder. 

 

I couldn’t see, of course, what he’d branded into the tender flesh where my buttocks met my thigh, but I knew by the shape of my agony that it was a cross.

 

“What about me?” I heard then, raising my snot-covered face to see with horror my little brother standing stubborn and unafraid in the doorway to the kitchen.  “Don’t I get a mark to make me the Lord’s?”

 

There wasn’t anything in his voice of mockery, as far as I could tell, and if he meant it like a brat, there was nothing on his face, neither.

 

Pa didn’t even look at him, though, just turned away, saying, “Wouldn’t do you no good.  You got the mark of the Devil on you.”

 

Between them, I lay panting on my belly, afraid to pull my pants up for how much it would hurt, equally afraid of what Pa might do if I left myself half-naked there.

 

I didn’t hear him coming.  First I knew of Samuel at my side was his hand, tracing the lines of flaring pain near my naked ass.

 

“Stop,” I hissed, pain blooming huge in the small of my back, something else stirring deeper down that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to.  Samuel whispered my name and then his hand came into view, offering help to stand.  I wasn’t proud enough not to take it, and I reckon that was when things changed between us.

 

After that, he was different, and I was, too.  You might say we went for the worse, but I don’t know about that.  On the balance, I think we about broke even, least ‘til now.

 

*****  

 

At fourteen, I took to breeding Caesar at farms around the county, Pa’s demon-casting having dried up when the zeal for it fell away and people turned to faith-healing and revivalists instead.  Still, Pa travelled, further afield and longer a-going.  I didn’t complain that he wasn’t making money.  It was relief that he was gone, though I was big and heavy enough now to keep him off of me, and he’d never troubled Samuel, hardly looked his way or spoke to him still.

 

Samuel loved Caesar, and he came along on every trip, helped me pad his horns and wrangle him, rope around his horns to lead him, Samuel bringing up the rear with a switch.  Sometimes I’d look back from the saddle across Buell’s spotted rump to see my little brother smiling, snapping the switch in the air, strange look on his face that made me weak on the inside, made me turn away and think about dipping sheep, a job I hated.

 

The McIntyres had a place down by the river, a tall house, lonely on the rise, and then a splendor of green lawn sloping down to the muddy river bank, where willows wept and bent toward the water and trout pocked the surface with their mouths. 

I liked it there, always thought it was like the Jordan must be.  On our side of the river was nothing but a return home to the windy wide-open, the grey-board house and listing barn, the yard where my father’s chickens shit and pecked.

 

Across the water, sluggish on a wide ox-bow, a shotgun house stood sentinel, skirted with dried mud from the flood and ebb of the river.  I wondered every time who lived there and if I could get away or if they’d stop me when I tried to pass, like my kind wasn’t welcome in the Promised Land. 

 

But I couldn’t swim, and I figured there probably wasn’t no land of Canaan anyway, not really.  And besides, Samuel would never go. 

 

He fixed his eyes on Caesar as the big bull trotted toward the cow pen, the heifer already spraddle-legged, head low, blowing and moaning for it.

 

Tess McIntyre came out onto the back porch and smiled at me, shy and bare-footed, and I got angry all at once that she should watch.

 

“Go on in,” I called, tearing my eyes from Samuel’s rapt face.  “Go in.”  Her smile faltered and she looked scared for a flash before turning on her heel, tossing her hair, and sashaying back through the slamming screen door.

 

Weren’t nothing there I wanted, anyway, but it felt a little empty in my chest regardless, until I looked again at Samuel, at his tongue skating out over his bottom lip and the way his hips swayed where he stood, watching.

 

Caesar mounted the cow in a rush, all that bearing weight coming down on her back, and she lowed and swayed, pitching this way and that until she steadied.  Mr. McIntyre nodded from across the pen, called, “Looks good,” and then went back to work on his thresher.

 

The heifer set to a rhythmic moan from deep in her chest, and I felt something breaking low down in me, felt heavy in my belly and hot, as if it were mid-August and not early November .

 

“Samuel,” I said, dry-throated, and my brother turned his eyes from the bull and cow, something in his face rapt still.

 

He took me in then, and he knew me clear through, like always.  And he offered me his hand.

 

That first time we stood behind the sheep shed, out of sight of the house and of Mr. McIntyre but well within God’s reaching eyes, the blue sky overhead spinning dizzily as Samuel took me in his hand and I swelled.

 

I tried to say, “No,” but nothing came, and the feel of it, his hand fumbling at me, his breath at my neck, his words, scripture and my name all jumbled, made me ashamed enough to weep until a wave of something hot and hungry broke across my back and I bent in a groan like the cow’s and came into my brother’s hand.

 

His next words were biblical, too, but darker ones, from chapters Pa hadn’t used in my hearing since I got big enough to fight back, words about the sins of the flesh and the sinners who lay down in filth, words Samuel said with a smile, like they meant something else to him.

 

He wiped my seed from his hand in the tall grass and said, “We should mark it.” I didn’t know what he meant until he pulled his penknife from his pocket and carved one of the words into the soft wood at the base of the rear shed wall.

 

“Samuel,” I started, but my voice was like the shirring of locusts in the dry corn, and he just smiled and smiled, putting away his knife and heading for the pen, where Caesar had finished the business he’d come for and the cow swayed hang-headed, dripping with his seed.

 

*****

 

We took care never to do it under the sky again, but there were plenty of dark nights when it was just Samuel and me, just the two of us and the damned wind and the vault of heaven overhead, pressing down on us through the roof.

 

Sometimes we did it in Pa’s bed, and I’d lie awake after with my brother’s steady breath on my bare chest, and I’d think of what had come over me, of the devil inside that couldn’t be cast out, and how it was me with the mark of God that Samuel took care to trace with his tongue, and him with no mark upon him, his skin clear and white and pure like a lamb’s wool, and wonder what works of God or the Devil were these and hold him tighter ‘til he stirred awake and I sinned again.

 

And we took to staying later and longer, letting the morning light cast itself on the secret places of our bodies, and we knew what would happen, knew and didn’t heed it.

 

The thundering voice that finally smote us weren’t God’s at all but the devil that had always been with us.

 

“And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger: Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not.”

 

The belt struck me high across my cheek before I could bring an arm up to stop it, but before Pa raised his hand for a second strike, Samuel was on him.  He laughed, laughed high and free the way he would to see Caesar running toward the cow pasture, and struck wild.

 

“Go and sin no more,” he cackled as I tried to pull him off our Pa.  “Cast the first stone!” he cried, hitting and hitting.

 

When I pulled him off of Pa, Samuel was light in my arms, all spindly legs and naked hide, wet like a newborn calf.  He’d grown tall and lost his baby fat in the last year.  Still, he bucked against my hold, crying, “Judge not!” and laughing.

 

Pa huddled on the floor, breath hoarse, blowing blood bubbles from his broken nose.

 

“They have chosen their own ways, and their souls delight in their abominations,” he growled, crawling on his knees toward the bedstead, using it to rise unsteadily to his feet.

 

His hands shook, his head wobbling on his neck, as he took us in, naked and sweaty and stained with his blood and our seed.

 

“Abominations,” he said again.

I let Samuel down, and he skipped out of my reach, going wide of Pa, though Pa was swaying like a poplar in a storm wind, and I didn’t think he had much fight left in him.

 

“You need to leave,” I said to Pa, eyeing Samuel behind him.  He was reaching for the poker.  “Go on, now, and don’t come back.  Go on.”

 

“They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons and shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters. And the land was polluted with blood.”

 

I didn’t know he had a gun, don’t know where he got it.  We’d never had more than a shotgun for snakes and mad dogs, but there it was, big and black, a revolver, I think, though I’d never seen one before.

 

“The land was polluted,” Pa repeated, sounding lost, out of his head.

 

Behind him, the black poker rose like judgment.

 

“Samuel,” I tried to say, but my voice stuck in my throat.  “Samuel,” I might have said.  “He’s your Pa.”

 

But I didn’t.

 

So I guess that makes me guilty.  And I’m ready to meet my Maker.  I got a few things to say to him on the subject of devils who quote scripture.  Got something to say about brothers, too.

 

You just let Samuel alone.  He did what he done for me.  I’m the one that made it so he had to sin.  I’m gallows bound, just like Pa said—ravens and vultures to eat at my flesh.  And I’m the one that has to stand before the throne on the last day, not Samuel.  He’ll come to judgment sweet and clear, you hear me? 

 

He’s got lamb’s skin, my brother, did you know?  Pure and white.

 

But me?  I got the devil’s mark.


End file.
